World Lines

Changing views of spacetime along the world line of a rapidly accelerating observer

In this animation, the vertical direction indicates time and the horizontal direction indicates distance, the dashed line is the spacetime trajectory ("world line") of an accelerating observer. The small dots are arbitrary events in spacetime that are stationary relative to each other. The events passing the two diagonal lines in the lower half of the picture (the past light cone of the observer) are those that are visible to the observer.

The slope of the world line (deviation from being vertical) gives the relative velocity to the observer. Note how the view of spacetime changes when the observer accelerates. In particular, absolute time is a concept not applicable in Lorentzian spacetime: events move up-and-down in the figure depending on the acceleration of the observer.

I chose this image, (hopefully it animates) because it graphically shows, in wonderful fashion, how we move through space and time as temporary arrangements of the quantum foam that comprises all of reality. While looking at this, I also cannot help to think about how tech creates an illusion of regularity over the quantum world that defines our existence, something quite astonishing given just how chaotic the multiverse truly is.

As designer, I depend on straight lines to create art, a notion totally alien to how reality actually works as straight lines don't really exist as seen through the lens of Thermodynamics, Relativity, Chaos &  Quantum Theory. In a very perceptive article written by Dimitri Orlov, the concept of straight lines is but a fiction, intended to give us a sense of false security in attempting to understand the mysterious world in which we live.

"This is good enough for most of us, and so we have come to regard straight lines as natural. In fact, in our world there are just two types of natural phenomena that give rise to straight lines: objects drop or hang down in straight vertical lines, and light beams travel in straight lines; beyond plumb lines and lines of sight everything is either a curve or a squiggle. But since most of our environment is artificial—and crammed full of straight lines and flat horizontal and vertical surfaces—we hardly ever have to confront this fact. Of course, the more scientifically astute among us know that straight lines are but a convenient fiction. We start with a conceptual framework of space that consists of x, y and z axes, and proceed to coerce our observations to fit this framework until the mismatch becomes too obvious to ignore, as with objects dropped from orbit, or with light from far-away galaxies that’s so warped by nearby galaxies that the image looks like a smear."

Interestingly enough, the digital tools that give us straight lines also give rise to Chaos Theory, a means to model the real world using recursion, feedback and computation, constructs able to discern how deep aspects of reality function, without the use of straight lines. :)

Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, physics, economics  and philosophy studying the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. This sensitivity is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.

1. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behaviour is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random  elements involved.
2.  In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.

"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer"— Douglas Adams